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March 01, 2007

Why Don't We Know Who Tamika Huston Is?

What do Dr. Mark Warschauer
and Michelle Gibson have in common?

Let’s see.

Dr. Warschauer
has written seven books, including Technology and Social Inclusion:
Rethinking the Digital Divide, which discusses “haves” and “have-nots” and
how differential access to information technologies contributes to economic
stratification.

Michelle Gibson
has not written any books. In fact, she is one of those “have-nots” about which
Dr. Warschauer writes.

Dr. Warschauer is
Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine, and has also taught at the University of Hawaii, Moscow LinguisticUniversity, and Charles University in Prague.

Michelle Gibson works
several jobs cleaning up human waste in nursing homes.

Dr. Warschauer's research focuses on the integration of information and
communication technologies (ICT); the impact of ICT on literacy; and the
relationship of ICT to institutional reform.

Michelle
Gibson’s research focuses on having enough money to feed her children.

As noted on his website, Dr. Warschauer's personal interests include
“bicycling, chess, water sports, and, of course, his family.”

Homeless,
Michelle Gibson’s personal interests include finding a place for her family to
live.

Dr. Warschauer
is white.

Michelle
Gibson is black.

On August
8, 2003,
Dr. Warschauer drove to work, forgetting that his son Michael was in the car.

On May
22, 2005,
Michelle Gibson didn’t have a babysitter and did the only thing she knew to do:
she left her son Devin in the car as she started her 16-hour shift at Mountain Trace Nursing Center.

What do Dr.
Warschauer and Michelle Gibson have in common? They both killed their children.
And that’s where the similarity ends.

Dr. Warschauer
intended to drop his 10-month-old son at day care before going to work.
Instead, he drove to his office and parked, leaving Mikey sleeping in his car
seat in 80 degree weather. As Warschauer walked back from lunch, he spotted
paramedics in the parking lot. Mikey was dead from heat stroke.

When Michelle Gibson
checked on her 8-year-old son, he was also dead.

Prosecutors
did not press charges against Dr. Warschauer, ruling the death accidental and
his loss punishment enough. There was no doubt, they said, that Dr. Warschauer
adored Mikey.

Michelle
Gibson was charged with second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and felony
child abuse. She and her grief remain in Jackson County Jail on a $100,000
bond. Why are we so quick to question whether she, like Warschauer, adored her
son?

And why such
disparity in treatment? Both babies are irretrievably dead. One parent was
well-off, well-regarded, and white; the other poor, anonymous, and black. Both
were sleep deprived. Both made disastrous judgments.

These
deaths are a horrible tragedy. Is one criminal and one not? I don’t know. But I
wonder why we are so quick to judge Michelle Gibson and so fast to pardon Dr.
Warschauer. Didn’t both parents, both working hard and both exhausted, neglect
their children? Is Michelle Gibson’s sorrow less sorrowful, her tragedy less
tragic, her poor judgment poorer? Does our dismissal of her also point to an
insidious pattern of privilege that disadvantages and even erases the
dark-skinned and the poor?

Young women of
color go missing in great numbers each year, yet our national attention is
riveted on wealthy, white women: Elizabeth Smart the harpist, Chandra Levy the
Capitol Hill intern, Jennifer Wilbanks the runaway bride. Why don’t we know the
names of Tamika Huston, Tyesha Bell, or Alexis Patterson? They are missing like
their white counterparts, but their names and stories are unknown. Why?

The
leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S.is
murder, disproportionately high for mothers of color, yet People magazine
focuses on Laci Peterson and Lori Hacking and not their dark-skinned
compatriots like Evelyn Hernandez, her pregnant torso also found in the San Francisco Bay.

Is it less important, less
newsworthy, less relevant to lose people of color? Are minority victims, in
effect, less human? Is their sorrow not as sorrowful, their tragedy not as
tragic?

We
tend to see people who are like us as three-dimensional, with detail and
specificity afforded them: for example, you know much more about Dr. Warschauer
than Michelle Gibson after reading this essay. Gibson remains one dimensional:
faceless, she is just one poor and homeless single parent among many without
the same level of specificity we give ourselves. She is the “other”; we can’t
see ourselves in her story. In creating that distance, we ignore and disregard
her, we de-humanize and erase her. We simply judge her.

Dr. Warschauer forgot Mikey because he was up late working
on a research paper and was exhausted, he said. We can see ourselves in that
story, we identify, we feel personally vulnerable: “if this smart, professional
man could forget, maybe I could, too.”

But we must not only see ourselves in Warschauer’s story.
We must also recognize part of ourselves in Gibson’s life, homeless and
exhausted from manual labor in 16-hour shifts, unable to find a way out,
without access to affordable childcare. We must not look away, rendering her
existence as undifferentiated and one-dimensional.

Michelle Gibson, like Mark Warschauer, is a
three-dimensional human being—not just a destitute, homeless, black woman with
poor judgment. And until we know her story and can see ourselves in it in the
same way we identify with Warschauer’s—until we can acknowledge that she has
the same hopes and dreams as we do, and until we are as transformed by her
experience as she is by trying to survive in our world—then she and others like
her will never get our full attention and they will never get justice.

Comments

The article on the two different outomes of the crimes of leaving kids in the car was thought provoking-just why could the poor woman have at least told her kid to wait in a room thats all-or checked on him in the car-but certainly the doctor should have been charged-I agree with that